oelvn project Four Horsemen + FINALLY RELEASED!!

[aleax]

Hey Fuwanovel forum folk! I'm Kevin, founder of a tiny independent game studio called Nuclear Fishin' Software, based in NYC. Over the past half year, we've been developing a new visual novel / SLG in Ren'Py. It's called Four Horsemen, and it's not like any other SLG you have played before.

To fund development the rest of the way, we're launching a Kickstarter campaign very soon! Before we do that, though, we'd like to get some feedback from players who are familiar with VNs in general and Ren'Py games specifically. And where better than here? 

(edit 2) The game is out, and is available for purchase on itch.io! Thanks so much to everyone who supported us. Also, please vote for us on Steam Greenlight so we can get the game on Steam!

(edit) Our Kickstarter is live!! Please back us if you like what you see.

 

PROJECT INTRODUCTION

Four Horsemen is an upcoming visual novel / SLG about immigrant lived experiences, with a touch of magical realism.
You play as a group of four immigrants in their mid-teens, the Riders, who discover a long-forgotten, empty World War II-era machinegun bunker on the edge of town. They turn it into a secret clubhouse where they can hang out and do teenagery things like drink booze and play video games without adult supervision, and in doing so, they inadvertently create a new community.

What this community does, and what it is for, is up to you. You'll spend much of the game gathering resources and building things to put in the clubhouse, and your choices of what you have the kids do and make will set the kids' priorities and consequently drive the storyline. 
What's not up to you is the world outside the clubhouse, which will slowly encroach on your burgeoning community. It will force the kids to come to terms with the politics that brought them to their new homeland, and the legacy they have inherited from their parents' country, a land they barely know.
Political realities will also impede your ability to interact with NPCs and gather resources. Unlike other SLGs, you can't just stat-grind, buy, and bribe your way to a Good End--institutional racism will harry your production, forcing you to think outside the box and negotiate, borrow, improvise, and steal what you need. (Non-spoiler: What you build doesn't matter nearly as much as how you build it.)

The big twist is that virtually everything in the game--the nature of the tragedy that brought these children to foreign shores, what the kids' values are, what language they swear in, what arcs are and aren't available, what the price of a wooden table leg is--all these things are determined by which fictional country the kids are from, and which fictional country they live in. You get to pick which country the kids are from on your first playthrough. On every playthrough after that, the game picks for you.

The result will be an SLG with unprecedented replayability. On your second play, you might notice that choices that helped you win the first time around are missing, or that NPCs respond differently to different dialogue options. Resources that were easy to get before might now be hard, characters who were crucial the first time around have been replaced with new, different characters (forcing you to play an entirely different arc), and so on. Like real immigrant teenagers, you will have to figure out each new culture on your own, and constantly make decisions about whether you want to conform to it or stick by your own principles and work against it. This forces you to use real social skills to guide your decisions, rather than just telling NPCs what they want to hear or what sounds like it would produce the best reward.

 

FEATURES

• Gorgeous art by the immensely talented comics artists Iasmin Omar Ata and Olga Andreyeva
• Stunning soundtrack by professional game audio designer Alyssa Menes and a variety of very talented independent bands, inspired by punk rock and its conceptual descendants (including postrock, riot grrl, and antifolk).
• Possibly the most complex treatment of immigration and racism ever to be explored in a video game--half a year of research, interviews, and difficult real-life conversations with immigrants from dozens of different real-life cultures ensure this won't just be a simple morality tale about how people from ethnic majorities should be nice to people from ethnic minorities. 
• Repatriation! Assimilationist paternalism! Shifting historical identities! Historical complicity! Identity in exile! Inspired by both real-life twentieth century history and recent events, this game takes an international worldview, and does not shy away from difficult or uncomfortable questions.
• (Not in demo) Unique structure: Play through the whole game in a weekend, every weekend, for months; different every time.
• Meta-motivation tracking: choices are balanced to gently troll players who follow SLG genre conventions instead of their hearts.
• Lots of animations and other little surprises to keep things interesting.
• Deliberately broken economy loop -- use your heart and your wits to obtain what you can't get from the item shop!
• (Not in demo) No wish fulfillment--you can start a romantic relationship between any two PCs, but beware, teenage romantic relationships are just as transient and awkward as they are in real life.
• Tense, exciting microaggression system (instead of combat), with fancy Phoenix Wright-like animations.
• Empathy is your only weapon! (That, and your fists.)

 

CHARACTER ARCHETYPES

Though you'll play as a different set of four characters each playthrough, they always conform to the same four archetypes, each one inspired by a different Horseman of the Apocalypse from Christian-Islamic eschatological tradition.
This reflects the uncanny feeling, common among travelers and schoolteachers, of meeting the same people over and over, with small but significant variations--amplified by the cultural forces of globalization, which draw teenagers of particular temperaments to the same clothes, music, and hobbies all over the world.
The protagonists of Four Horsemen are not literal personifications of their religious namesakes, but as war, death, famine, and pestilence are intimately tied to the human experience of immigration, the central conflict of each character is defined by one of these concepts in a way that is meant to resonate with the experiences of people who have experienced them in reality.

 

WAR

The leader of the Riders and the only first-generation immigrant of the group, War's haunted eyes and tough demeanor belie the playfulness of a girl who struggles to balance between growing up too soon and catching up too late on her lost childhood. Her future taken from her at an early age, War lives in the moment, burying a deep, implacable sadness in sports and drinking and video games. Her considerable leadership skills, overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and deep fascination with ancient history are overlooked by her teachers at school, who write her off as a ditzy tomboy partybro. Though quick to anger, and extremely protective of her younger sister Death, she is surprisingly slow to violence, due to her early experiences with bloodshed. When she does pick fights, though, watch out! Mercy is not a concept she understands.
Because she's the only Rider who remembers the old country, the other Riders see her as a sort of wise-woman figure, a role for which she is woefully unprepared. She spends a lot of time worrying about who she really is.
War's storylines deal with themes of personal identity, security, armed conflict, heritage, and nation-building.

 

DEATH

A free spirit and incorrigible smartass who talks the same way IRL as she does on the Internet, Death couldn't care less about politics or identity. Death lives for one thing and one thing only: to make something even cooler than the last thing she made. She has a gift for electrical engineering, but talent doesn't necessarily equal competence--at her early age, she's still kind of figuring out how everything works, and sometimes everything, well, doesn't. Everyone but her thinks her talent is going to make her rich and famous someday, a perception against which she constantly struggles. A few early, horrifying years in a refugee camp made her keenly aware that she's never going to have the same opportunities as other kids her age, and she often has to balance her pathological fear of missing out with her obsession with catching up. These experiences, and the toxicity of online communities, bestow on her both an acerbic wit and an unbearable loneliness.
Death's storylines deal with themes of lived experience, erasure, self-determination, industry, and the meaning of labor.

 

FAMINE

A wide-eyed, impressionable, easily impressed little dude, Famine has it pretty good compared to War and Death--he's a naturalized citizen who grew up in his new country, speaks with the local accent, and could almost pass for a native if given the chance. But this "almost" is what torments him: he's the only child of a single dad, he's an unremarkable student, he's just a little too awkward to be well liked at school, and there's always just barely not enough money to get by without cutting corners. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Famine doesn't believe the deck is stacked against him. A better world is always within reach! He believes that with a little gumption and a lot of hard work, anything is possible! ("Anything" includes winning the affections of Death, who he has a massive crush on, and who, of course, will not give him the time of day.)
Famine wears a French maid costume when he dusts the clubhouse because it is a practical outfit for dusting. Shut up. You would too, if he wasn't the only one who ever bothered to dust this fucking sty. You slacker.
He is best bros with Pestilence and looks up to him immensely, which is a little mysterious since Pestilence has no ambition. They like weed.
Famine's storylines deal with themes of opportunity, entrepreneurship, gender roles, equality, respectability, and institutional privilege.

 

PESTILENCE

Pestilence is an enigma wrapped in a shroud of pot smoke. The son of two unremarkable, well-off parents from the old country, Pestilence has spent his entire life in his new homeland, and is widely reviled. His family was part of the community that welcomed War and Death out of a refugee camp in their early childhood, and the sisters consider him a family friend. Everyone else, except for Famine, seems to distrust him--his teachers insist he's trouble, though he rarely makes any; the police hassle him at every opportunity; taxi drivers and social workers are struck by a sudden and terrible deja vu. 
Pestilence is accustomed to this reaction and takes it in stride. He is very friendly and sees himself as a sort of Mister Rogers figure, preaching simple, occasionally grim aphorisms from doctor's office brochures. Naturally, Famine thinks he's the chillest person ever, and they are best bros.
Though he generally comes off as a carefree gentle giant, Pestilence has strong convictions and will passively resist anyone who stands against them. It is rumored that when the immigration bureau sent his parents the eighth late notice for his resident alien registration, Pestilence mailed them a drawing of a smiling cockroach flying a UFO.
Pestilence's storylines deal with themes of religion, conquest, demography, social justice, and the spread of ideas.

 

WHO WE ARE

Nuclear Fishin' Software is based in Brooklyn, New York, and our core creative team consists of:

 

• Kevin Chen (writing, programming, direction, design) -- that's me!
• Iasmin Omar Ata (character design, CG illustration)
• Olga Andreyeva (background and item illustration)
• Alyssa Menes (music and sfx)

We are professionals with years of game industry experience, we are all immigrants, and we love SLGs--so being able to work on a game about a subject so close to our hearts is a real treat!

 

PROGRESS

So, while development on the Kickstarter playable WIP demo continues apace, we made a pre-Kickstarter preview build just for Fuwanovel, Lemmasoft, and some other VN forums. 

What's already done as of demo preview build v0.400:

• All the PC expressions and the vast majority of the NPCs as well
• Country system - play as characters from any of 10 different countries, with significant and far-reaching effects on dialogue and the choices available to you
• Economy loop and rewards - we won't spoil anything here, but this includes a lot of surprises
• One main route, complete except for the ending, which we have intentionally omitted (we wouldn't want to spoil anything before the final release!). We plan to do at least two more for the final release, perhaps more depending on funding
• Three minor routes, one of them fully complete, the rest nearly complete. There are also stubs for several others
• Microaggression system, in two different play modes, including an endboss
• An absurdly sophisticated profanity system - characters codeswitch naturally and swear in their native languages
• Dynamic BGM system - in addition to some incredible tracks across several different genres from our talented musician friends, each of the main characters has its own instrumental motif.
• Waaaaay more than we can list -- most of the game's systems are complete!

What's not done yet:

• New Game+ - all the ingame integration is in place, though since we only have one main route so far, we can't show you the depth of our New Game+ system just yet
• Replay is going to be more meaningful and varied once we have fully implemented the New Game+ system
• UI - we plan to do a massive overhaul if we're funded
• Day phase world map - we're working on making this even prettier and more intuitive, stay tuned!
• Tons more content - we plan to add at least two more main routes at the very least, each with unique NPCs
• A bunch of the higher tier items don't do what they're supposed to yet
• If we're funded, we'll keep iterating on the game's systems incrementally, improving playfeel and UI messaging, making the animations cooler, and generally making everything prettier, more polished, and more fun to play

 

We welcome any feedback you might have--especially if there's anything that might be a major dealbreaker in a decision about whether or not you'd buy the game. 
 

The latest demo preview build can be downloaded from our Kickstarter page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2119676637/four-horsemen

Please back us if you like what you see!

Edited May 4, 2017 by aleax
- conform to format in guidelines a little better

[aleax]

Happy 4/20, everyone!

Just wanted to announce that the extremely talented postrock artist skyflyingby has agreed to license us some music for BGM.
You can hear some of their marvelous work here: https://soundcloud.com/skyflyingby

If all goes well, there'll be a new demo build soon with music from skyflyingby and others. Watch this space!

How is everyone enjoying the demo so far?

[aleax]

Hey Fuwanovel!

Just bumping this thread to report that OUR KICKSTARTER IS LIIIIIIIIIIIVE 
If you like our concept, please back us!

There's also a new demo, featuring some gameplay changes, a ton of new music, and our all-new dynamic BGM system! Please check it out and tell us what you think.

We'll follow up soon with a post on our profanity engine--already possibly the most sophisticated profanity model in video games--which is just about due for an upgrade that will make it even more realistic in how it handles swearing in languages other than English.

[aleax]

Hey Fuwanovel! Holy crap did our Kickstarter take off. (Way better than we imagined!) Those of you who backed us, you have my thanks. And if you haven't, there's still time! 

Rather than paste an enormous wall of text into the progress section of the OP, I'm just going to link to our latest public backer update, which is about our newest character, Eris. She is a NPC marysue. (Yes, you read that right.)

That post on the profanity system is still coming; we want to make a few fixes and release a new version of the demo first. Stay tuned!

[aleax]

Hey Fuwanovel,

Bumping this thread to announce that the game is finally out

Purchase it on itch.io, or vote for us on Steam Greenlight so we can get it in your Steam library.